Editor’s Note: This item is a special guest post by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project, a national organization that works in communities across the country to elect progressive candidates and promote LGBT civil rights. This article is based upon TPP’s work on the “No on 1” campaign in Maine, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures. Several interviewees quoted in the piece are not identified by name at their own request. Jasmine has written for The Democratic Strategist in the past, and her writing has appeared in The Advocate, Alternet.org, American Short Fiction and other publications.
Back in late September, I traveled with two friends to Biddeford, Maine, to volunteer with the “No on 1” campaign, which was working to defeat Question 1, a proposal to strike down a law legalizing same-sex marriage in that state. It rained all day, the kind of weather that oscillates between mist and downpour and that, on a mild day, makes you laugh at its sheer excess. Our task was straightforward: go door to door, ask people how they planned to vote, rate them on a scale of one to five, and move on. The campaign was in the final stretch of the persuasion stage and this would be one of the last times they had face-to-face contact with swing voters. We were assigned to a middle-class neighborhood in which single-family homes dotted either side of a busy two-lane road. There were no sidewalks, and passing cars gave me a wide berth as I mucked along on the shoulder of the road, as obtrusive as a safety-conscious hunter in my orange raincoat.
Since 2004, the LGBT movement has lost thirty such campaigns across the nation and a lot was at stake in Maine. All of those losses had been explained by factors like inadequate funding, or in the case of the California “No on 8” campaign, an anemic field operation. The “No on 1” campaign was determined to do things better, and by all standard metrics they did.
At that point in the campaign season, the polls were dead even, which in these kind of ballot measures usually means we are actually down by a few points. But the “No on 1” campaign had already raised over $2 million, twice as much as the other side. Volunteers had been canvassing since early summer, and there were paid organizers on the ground across the state. A national network of donors and field volunteers was also bolstering our efforts. Perhaps most significantly, the campaign had already identified the number of supporters they needed to win. Campaign lore holds that if you have these names on paper by early October and run a tight turnout operation, you will win in November.
I was almost done with my shift when I approached a brick ranch house with an open garage. A man in his sixties was wiping off an Allen wrench. Next to him was a motorcycle with long, athletic lines and a gleaming turquoise body. He was friendly as we talked about his bike and the weather. If he raised his eyebrows when I explained why I was there, the conversation didn’t abruptly stop in its tracks, as sometimes happens. “I’ll be voting yes,” he said evenly.
“Can I ask why?”
“The Bible says one man, one woman.”
I nodded. In literal terms, he was right. In moments like this, I’ve often responded by coming right back about what else the Bible says. But this has never led anywhere except a quick dead end. So instead, I asked if I could talk with his wife.
She joined us in the garage, and it was then that I noticed the scooter propped next to the motorcycle, its body a turquoise that perfectly matched the bigger bike’s.
“Do you ride together?” I asked.
They laughed. “I let her get ahead,” the man said, “and then I catch her.”
She explained that she also opposed gay marriage. “As a married gay person, I can tell you that not much changes for anyone but the couple,” I said. “It mostly comes up when you’re talking about things like hospital visits, times when you really need your rights.”
“Our grandson is gay,” the woman said. “We raised him.” She went on to explain that their grandson was having a difficult time. From the time he was a child, she said, she’d known he was gay.
“I never picked up on it. She had to tell me,” her husband chimed in and they laughed again.
“Is it hard for you that he’s gay?” I asked the man.
He seemed surprised by this question and this in itself was telling. It became clear that their grandson was part of their life and much loved, if not fully understood. The conversation continued and then a bit suddenly, the man choked up and wiped his eyes. “I knew a guy growing up who was that way and he got picked on a lot. I used to stand up for him.” His wife put her arm around him. “He can’t stand when people get picked on,” she said.
For a moment, it was silent in the garage.
“Making same-sex marriage illegal sends a message that we’re second class citizens. It opens the doors for people to get picked on, and worse,” I said. They listened, but weren’t terribly persuaded. The conversation circled back to The Bible. I told them I was Christian and brought up an example of scripture that we don’t tend to follow literally – the mandate to give away all your material possessions. We spent a few minutes on this. But again, not terribly persuasive.
“Should I put you both down as planning to vote yes?” I asked.
“You know, I’m still making up my mind,” the woman said. “I just don’t know.”
The conversation ended a few minutes later when their dog – small, blind and adventurous – raced out of the garage and toward the road. The woman went to rescue him. I asked them to keep thinking about the issue and thanked them for the conversation, one of the longest I’ve ever had canvassing. It was also one of the most moving. I have thought of it countless times since then.
Walking away, I rated her as a “three,” or swing voter, and him as a “four,” or likely to vote yes. According to a literal interpretation of the campaign playbook, this conversation had actually been a waste of time in every regard except one: the campaign now knew not to spend time and resources doing further outreach to this couple. At this point in the campaign cycle, an exacting calculus kicks in and attention shifts to turning out identified supporters, “one’s” and “two’s” on the scale. All other voters are lumped together and categorized as unwinnable. For the next five weeks, this couple and voters like them would not hear directly from the campaign, except in TV ads. This is considered smart organizing, and typically it is.
So what went wrong when, five weeks later, the voters of Maine passed Question 1 by a margin of 53 – 47%, making gay marriage illegal? There has been virtual consensus that the “No on 1” campaign was well-run. The leadership of national organizations blamed the loss on the slow tides of history and the bigoted tactics of our opponents. Some grassroots activists said that after thirty-one losses, we should accept that these campaigns are unwinnable and start focusing our efforts elsewhere. Pundits also weighed in, with Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com observing that, “this may not be an issue where the campaign itself matters very much; people have pretty strong feelings about the gay marriage issue and are not typically open to persuasion.”
Here’s where I disagree. This loss confirmed a lesson that the thirty preceding it only suggested: we cannot win the support of swing voters by adhering to the traditional campaign playbook. To do so, we must tear out a few pages and write new plays.

Read more…

On Saturday, Tom Jensen — a pollster for Public Policy Polling — offered up an important data point from the company’s last national survey:

Barack Obama’s approval rating with people who didn’t vote for him is 14%.
Barack Obama’s disapproval rating with people who voted for him is 6%.
So he’s won over twice as many people as he’s lost since he got elected. Who in the national media is going to write that story?

We aren’t the national media, but it’s a point well taken.

As Ed Kilgore has noted on several occasions, the Senate is towing with a variety of opt-in or opt-out schemes for a health reform public option that would effectively shift major decisions (and perhaps hard-to-calculate costs) to the states. Said states have already been worrying about their share of the costs involved in expanding Medicaid coverage, which is a piece of the health reform puzzle in every version of the legislation.
Now, as Suzy Khimm of The New Republic reports, one draft version of the House bill (the one with a “negotiated rate” approach to the public option) boosts Medicaid eligibility significantly more than past versions (to 150% of the poverty rate). Although House leaders say states will be “held harmless” in the short run for the elibility increase, it´s not clear how that will be achieved, and where the state funds will come from for a much larger Medicaid population in the long run. So state leaders really do have a complicated task in ensuring they are prepared, fiscally and politically, to potential changes in the federal-state health care “partnership,” which could be just over the horizon.

There have obviously been a lot of lies told about health care reform this year, including lies about its provisions, costs and benefits, But as William Galston notes today in The New Republic, there’s a growing temptation among reform advocates to prevaricate a bit too, particularly via the sorts of accounting gimmicks that made the Bush administration notorious. The real problem, says Galston, is the risk of self-deception about the true costs of health reform:

This may strike some readers as a detail, or worse, as a diversion. I don’t think so. We’re already facing an unsustainable fiscal future. The least we can do is to honor the political version of the Hippocratic oath and do no harm. That’s what President Obama has promised. Serious legislators shouldn’t use accounting tricks—such as pushing deficits outside CBO’s scoring windows–to sidestep this pledge.

Yeah, we’ve had enough of that from the bad guys.

Polls three years in advance of a presidential contest aren’t worth a lot generally, but they do give you a sense of the sentiments of hard-core, high-attention “base” voters who have a disproportionate impact on the nominating process. The latest offering from Rasmussen on the possible Republican field shows Sarah Palin fading a bit (her new insta-book is probably coming out just in time), and Tim Pawlenty continuing to arouse mysteriously high levels of disdain.
The “who-do-you-favor-for-2012” poll has Mike Huckabee ahead at 29%, Mitt Romney at 24%, Palin at 18%, Newt Gingrich at 14%, and Pawlenty at 4%. More interestingly, the “who-do-you-least-favor” question puts TimPaw at 28%, Palin at 21%, Gingrich at 20%, Romney at 9%, and Huckabee at 8%. Usually little-known candidates don’t arouse much hostility, but in the current GOP atmosphere, it’s possible that a goodly number of conservative base voters don’t like any potential nominee who hasn’t spent sufficient time howling at the moon about socialism and the destruction of the Constitution. Indeed, it’s worth noting that one candidate who has distinguished himself in this respect, Mike Huckabee, seems to represent the center of the party right now, being most popular and least disliked.
The poll also asks GOPers how likely they think a win over the President is in 2012. 50% say victory is “very likely,” and another 31% “somewhat likely.” That could change, but primary voters who are very confident about a win tend to favor the most ideologically pure candidate available. This would not be Tim Pawlenty, who continues to be a fine candidate only on paper.

As everyone waits on the Senate Finance Committee’s final action today on health care reform, Ezra Klein has an interesting take on the final vote and what it will mean in terms of which senator has leverage in the rest of the process:

The big question mark is Olympia Snowe: She’s been given virtually everything she asked for. But there’s talk that she might withhold her vote to increase her leverage on the floor. As the thinking goes, if she votes for the bill coming out of committee, Democrats will assume she’s committed to the legislation and cease trying to woo her. On the other hand, if she votes against the bill coming out of committee, Democrats might decide she’s simply not serious about signing onto the legislation, and they’ll forge ahead with a 60-vote strategy.
But liberals should hope for an “aye” from Snowe. If she abandons the bill, that empowers Ben Nelson as the eventual dealmaker, much as he was during stimulus.

Whether you agree with Ezra or not on this point, it does appear that the votes on cloture and on final passage of health reform legislature have become hopelessly entangled, making the party identity of the cricial “decider” irrelevant.
UPDATE: So the vote was 14-9, and Olympia Snowe was on board for a fleeting moment of token bipartisanship. We’ll soon see if that helps with balking Donkeys in the Senate.

Many conservatives take umbrage at the charge that Fox “personalities” have any real power over the Republican Party. They should take a look at a new Salon piece by Gabriel Winant and Tim Bella laying out a timeline of attacks on the Obama administration by Glenn Beck that quickly made their way into the utterances of GOP politicians. They include the sudden obsession with policy “czars;” the demonization of Cass Sunstein and Van Jones; the suggestion that the president is seeking to indoctrinate young people into some sort of Hitler Youth style totalitarian shock force; the claim that the National Endowment for the Arts is heavily funding leftists; and the particularly bizarre argument that the U.S. Treasury is trying to create a global currency that would replace the dollar.
If conservatives want to dismiss Beck as nothing more than an entertainer with no practical impact on politics, they might want to tell their pols to stop dancing to his loony tunes.

Quite a few progressives have taken the position that only a “robust public option” (typically defined as a government-sponsored insurance plan linked to Medicare payment rates) can make a hybrid, private-insurance-based health reform system worthwhile. Otherwise, they argue, any initiative that includes individual and employer mandates will simply give private health insurers more customers and profits, without constraining costs or improving quality.
But barring the use of budget reconciliation procedures or a semi-miraculous act of party discipline on a cloture vote, a “robust public option” is unlikely to be enacted by the Senate, and could even encounter trouble on the floor of the House. So public option supporters (and opponents) have been mulling over a growing number of alternatives being floated by Senate Democrats (and one Republican, Olympia Snowe).
Tim Noah at Slate offers a good rundown of these “half-loaf” measures, including two he considers unacceptable: Conrad’s nonprofit cooperative approach, and Snowe’s public option “trigger.”
Tom Carper has suggested a “opt-in” state public option that would also allow states choosing to go in that direction to form regional public plans. And without a lot of fanfare, the Finance Committee has already adopted a proposal by Maria Cantwell that would allow states to use federal subsidy funds to directly make insurance available to a large category of the uninsured, up to and including creating state single-payer plans.
Sam Stein of HuffPo reports today on another wrinkle that’s being discussed: an “opt-out” variation on Carper’s state public option plan, which would have the advantage of creating a strong national public option that states could take or leave.
All these state-based approaches to the public option have the obvious goal of enabling key centrist Democrats to get out of the way of a public option while preserving the right of their own states to go in a different direction. This might be especially appealing to senators getting a lot of pressure from insurance companies and/or health care providers in their own states to oppose a public option affecting them.
It’s unclear which if any of these alternatives will emerge as the go-to plan, but without a doubt, a crucial factor will be the extent to which “robust public option” advocates, particularly in the House, decide to expand their own definition of an acceptable public option. Remember that many public option fans actually favor a single-payer system, and are disinclined to support any alternative that strengthens the hand of private health insurers. A lot may depend on whether they are reasonably sure their own states, and most states, will take advantage of opportunities to create the kind of public option they favor.
Meanwhile, state-level politicians will soon come to the realization that national health care reform may actually place them in the driver’s seat, and make the basic design of health care an even more dominant issue in their own political lives, perhaps beginning in 2010.

One of the favorite conservative talking points over this last year has been the argument that Barack Obama has been trying to move the United States towards “European-style socialism” even as Europe repudiated it. Never mind that Obama’s policy positions are a lot closer to those of Europe’s center-right parties than are the policy positions of the GOP. But in any event, the death of Euro-socialism has once again been greatly exaggerated, just as it was in the era of Margaret Thatcher.
A couple of weeks ago Portugal’s Socialist Party held onto power in parliamentary elections, albeit with reduced margins. And now comes the news that Greece’s center-left Pasok Party has won a resounding electoral victory, turning out the government of Costas Karamanlis and his center-right New Democracy Party. Pasok’s leader, George Papandreou, sure to be the next Greek prime minister, also happens to be president of the Socialist International.
Truth is that internal factors typically have more to do with specific electoral results than various theorists of Left or Right supremacy tend to admit. Regional trends also tend to be cyclical. Moreover, virtually every European government, regardless of its party configuration, remains “socialist” by American conservative standards.
So take away the Inevitable March of History from the factors that are supposed to re-deliver the U.S. to conservative rule in 2010 or 2012.

If you follow public opinion research on health care reform, you probably know that recent polls have generally shown a modest but definite trend towards support for reform efforts. The latest Gallup poll, for example, shows a plurality of respondents favoring reform legislation for the first time in a while. A new AP/GfK survey shows the support/oppose ratio on health reform has changed from 34/49 in September to 40/40 now.
There’s one quite jarring exception to this trend: Fox News, which released a poll this week showing that only 33% of Americans support health reform legislation, while 53% oppose it.
Since this is Fox we are talking about, could the results simply be a matter of systemic bias? You might think so, but as Nate Silver points out in a careful deconstruction of the poll at fivethirtyeight.com, the same survey puts the president’s job approval rate at 58%, a relatively high number.
How can you square the high approval rate with the exceptionally low assessments of the president’s top domestic priority? Look at where the questions appear in the poll, says Silver. The job approval question is first, while the health reform questions comes after a long series of heavily loaded questions about the president that are pretty close to Republican talking points. This is a texbook case of what is called “question order bias,” whereby poll questions that seem unobjectionable in isolation elicit very different responses when placed after “pushy” questions that predispose the respondent in one direction or another. And this is an old habit with Fox, helping to explain why its “horse-race” numbers during the last campaign–based on questions asked at the beginning of their surveys–were pretty much like everyone else’s, but its “issue” numbers tend to skew very, very conservative. As Silver concludes:

[T]hese question order effects can arise even when pollsters have the best of intentions, and even when they are asking unbiased questions. If, for instance, back during the Presidential campaign, you had asked a series of perfectly neutrally-worded questions on the economy before asking about the horse race, they could easily have tipped the numbers slightly in Obama’s direction, since the economy was perceived to be the Democrats’ strength….
But when you ask a series of biased questions before taking the voters’ temperature on health care or the horse race, you have much less excuse. Going forward, Fox News should put its health care questions closer to the top of their survey or break them out into a separate poll; take their numbers with a grain of salt until they do.

Make that a shaker of salt, Nate.